Marked for Death. Terry Gould
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principle: that the weak offered opportunities for the enrichment of the powerful. Political and religious predators who organize governments permit no investigation into their ultimate motives, and they react violently when journalists reveal that they serve themselves. In one form or another, all of the slain journalists in this book attempted to expose the organized criminal structure that ruled their nations, and came fatally close to its true workings and affiliations.
At its most fundamental level, organized crime is a licensing system. A gangster maneuvers or murders his way to the top and, to ensure he stays there, awards the right to engage in illegal activities in his territory, expecting tribute in return and providing protection from the law. That single mechanism governs all the nations where journalists are being murdered in greatest numbers. It follows the universal modus operandi: the rise to power is always accompanied by the return of favors—but with a twist. In nations run according to the principle of organized crime, favors are returned in the currency of impunity. Thus, political or religious rulers act like gang bosses, appointing their subordinates to bureaucracies with the understanding that while their salaries will be low, their incomes will be high. Corruption, an ad hoc arrangement in some countries, becomes a formal structure in these places. Lawlessness occurs within the law, and the system of organized crime is locked into the business of the nation. In this manner, the people are robbed and the rulers get rich, and anyone who attempts to defy the rulers finds out very quickly how “organized” organized crime can be.
Across borders and across time, this national licensing system is uniform. Understanding that system, and how governments use it to rule billions of people over millions of square miles, is crucial to understanding how much of the world works. It is also crucial to understanding why journalists are murdered with impunity when they attempt to expose it. In societies where everyone knows the truth but is afraid to speak it, laying out the facts can be an invitation to death. Yet for journalists who are motivated to expose destructive forces, publishing the truth is often the only option—an unavoidable step on the road to societal change, and, in some cases, personal redemption.
During my travels for this book, I tried to discover if there was one moment in the lives of these men and women when they realized they were willing to die for their stories. I am still not certain if all of them deliberately chose martyrdom, or merely used the acceptance of death as a psychological tool that was necessary to do their work. Some were so outraged by the criminality of their nations that they pushed their reporting into the realm of contemptuous editorializing, and were murdered shortly thereafter. Many of their colleagues were equally outraged but survived, and they offered me insights into what journalists had to do to increase their longevity when covering very dangerous territory. In one case, I was scheduled to interview a journalist who had defied the odds and, under constant threat of assassination, was still producing work even more defiant than that of her murdered colleagues. Her name was Anna Politkovskaya, and when I landed in Moscow I learned she had been shot to death while I had been in the air on my way to meet her. Politkovskaya is the subject of one of the chapters in this book.
Her murder, and other unexpected events in the countries I visited, turned what I thought would be a one-year project into one that has lasted four years. At all times I followed the advice of local journalists, pursuing the research slowly. At no time did I put myself in the crosshairs of the danger the victims had faced. I did not go into their towns announcing that I was there to incriminate evil-doers, as the murdered journalists had done. I did not conduct a series of murder investigations, but life investigations.
My greatest fear is that I have fallen short of doing justice to my subjects’ work. When murdered, all of them were in the midst of exposés that went a long way to explaining the problems of their countries. In turn, the problems of their countries went a long way to explaining the problems of their regions: Latin America, the Pacific Rim, South Asia, Eastern Europe and the Middle East. When put together, the historical and emotional contexts of the journalists’ exposés amounted to a compendium of the social and political forces at play in the world today. The way the journalists died underscored the power of these forces. I can only hope that I have conveyed at least part of what they taught me.
There is little doubt that in many countries murder works. It is the ultimate form of press censorship, eliminating the immediate problem and often intimidating others into silence. It works best when it occurs with impunity; and in the most murderous places for journalists, impunity reigns. Impunity scars the lives of innocent people, and it scarred the lives of the journalists in this book. And yet they kept at their work, with the full knowledge that their countries were ruled by murderous thugs who lived by the principle of organized crime. I have tried to honor them by bringing their lives and the stories they worked on to light, telling truth to those who would murder truth tellers.
ONE
SMALL TOWN, BIG HELL
Guillermo Bravo Vega, Colombia
I SAW GUILLERMO BRAVO VEGA for the first time in a photograph his colleagues showed me in a newsroom in Neiva, the Colombian town where he’d declared war on corruption. Under the headline “Journalist Assassinated” was a large-boned handsome man with rugged features, heavy brows and a full head of salt and pepper hair. Everything about him looked rough-cut, from his logger’s-sized hands gripping a microphone to his towering height against the backdrop of a cheering crowd. He was standing in a local union hall, announcing his latest exposé, a doubly defiant act in a country where three thousand trade unionists and three dozen journalists had been murdered. Bravo himself had narrowly escaped several assassination attempts, ignored countless death threats and been ordered to leave Neiva six times. Then, on April 28, 2003, after refusing to obey the seventh order, Bravo was murdered in his home. He was sixty-four years old.
Neiva is a heavily garrisoned coffee town in the Upper Magdalena Valley, about 150 miles southeast of Bogotá. Two ranges of the Andes flank the valley, with the eastern slope dropping to a jungle plain. In Bravo’s last years, the region from the valley to the plain was the main battleground of Colombia’s forty-year civil war, earning Neiva the sobriquet Pueblo chico, infierno grande—“Small Town, Big Hell.” Marxist guerrillas launched daily raids from a Switzerland-sized territory they controlled in the jungle, and right-wing paramilitaries roamed the valley, assassinating anyone whose left-wing politics offended them.
Bravo, an avowed leftist, blamed the unending conflict on what he called Colombia’s feudal injustices. The state of Huila and its capital Neiva, he wrote, were “shrouded by conquistadorean darkness.” Land, industry and government were in the grip of a tiny group of families, known as the Opitas Mafia, who were descended from the original Spanish colonizers and who had maintained their overlord status for three hundred years. Putting an end to their crony capitalism and criminal impunity was Bravo’s burning mission in life.
For most of his career that mission had been a lonely one. Bravo had quit or been fired from every newspaper he’d worked at, usually leaving in a rage after being forbidden to investigate the paper’s advertisers. He eventually began self-publishing a little magazine called Eco Impacto and then privately produced a half-hour TV show called Facts and Figures (Hechos y cifras). Over the years his independent journalism had sent ten people to jail and wreathed him in laurels, including a Simón Bolívar Award—the nation’s equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize. Despite his renown, Bravo’s journalism had never earned him more than a few hundred dollars a month.
“Guillermo never cared about money, he was obsessed with corruption,” a reporter named Diógenes Cadena told me as we sat in the lineup room of La Nación, one of the newspapers that had considered Bravo irrefrenable (uncontrollable). Cadena had worked for two years on the set of Facts and Figures, and said it felt as if he were inside a tornado that was willfully trying to turn the town upside down—or right side up. “Man, he had a temper. If he found out someone was up to something and covering it up, he’d come to the studio, he’d bang the table, he’d scream, ‘I’ll get that guy!’”
“Self-censoring was not one